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Thanks to the growing popularity of smartphones, more and more people are having their online identities stolen from cyber criminals.

Roughly 12 million Americans were victims of identity theft last year, 13% more than were reported in 2010, according to a study released on Wednesday from Javelin Strategy & Research. The dominance of smartphones and real-name social media websites like Facebook have helped contribute to the increase in ID fraud. Hackers looking for profit can not only find out where a person lives, how old they are, and where they were born, but they can break into smart phones through malicious programming and steal credit card information, running up charges.

The number of people whose information was accessed in a data breach increased by 67% in 2011, but that's mostly skewed by Sony Play Station data breach last year. Someone whose personal information is taken in a data breach is nearly 10 times more likely to fall prey to ID thieves.

"If you buy a new smartphone it is probably connected to your money somehow, and criminals can find your credit card account, the one you use to pay your phone bill with. Once they find it, they can do whatever they want with it," says Denis Maslennikov, a mobile malware researcher at Kaspersky Lab in Moscow.

Between 2004 and 2010, Kaspersky Lab discovered a little over 1,000 malware applications designed to profit from hacked mobile devices. They run the range of trojans that send SMS text messages to premium numbers, charging the phone account and giving profit to the premium phone number owners, to outright identity fraud, where thieves can discover bank account information linked to the customer's hacked smart phone and empty out bank accounts.

"We're up to around 1,000 new malware programs a month now,"says Maslennikov. "Most of it is from Android. It's not as safe as the iPhone. This year we'll see even more attacks on Android operating systems," he says.